Promotional items are a known marketing tool utilized throughout various industries. Promotional items are either sold or given away to customers or clients with the purpose of promoting a particular brand of products or services. For example, items such as pens, pencils, and notepads, are often used in the hospitality industry to promote hotel brands. Often, promotional items can be decorative items, but typically, promotional items are functional so as to increase the promotional value of the item. However, the commonality of these items (i.e. the fact that virtually every hotel offers pens or notepads displaying the hotel brand), and the fact that a user often fails to take these items with them, is an undesirable result of many promotional items known in the prior art. Users of these common promotional items become so accustomed to receiving them that the items lose promotional value. Thus, there is always a need for new and unique promotional items that offer unique opportunities to market, advertise, or promote a particular brand.
Hangers in general are useful tools for hanging garments. They help to organize garments as well as to keep their shape, for example, to prevent wrinkles from forming. Many people utilize a wide array of hangers for these very purposes. In the hospitality industry, for example the hotel-casino industry or the cruise-ship industry, hangers are typically provided in guestrooms. Additionally, hangers are widely used in high-end or luxury hotels that provide special services to their guest such as laundry and dry cleaning services.
Whether an individual privately sends their garments to a dry cleaning service, or a hospitality service provider offers a dry cleaning service to their guests, it is often necessary to transport multiple hangers and articles of clothing from one location to another. For example, when a person picks up their newly cleaned garments from a dry cleaner, it is typically necessary to take multiple cleaned garments placed upon multiple separate hangers, and transport the lot back to another location. Similarly, luxury hotels that offer premium services, such as dry cleaning services, must provide their guests with multiple hangers every time a guest requires cleaning of multiple articles of clothing. Often, the guest will desire to take their dry cleaned articles of clothing either from the reception's desk to their guestroom, or from their guestroom to their vehicle, for example, when leaving the hotel after a vacation or business trip. Thus, it is desirable to offer these service providers with a useful promotional item that addresses this issue, and allows for the promotion and marketing of their brand.
For example, when transporting newly dry-cleaned clothes in a vehicle, having multiple articles of clothing is particularly problematic. Placing multiple hangers on a hook provided in a typical car is burdensome, and often impossible, as multiple hangers may not fit on the typically small hook. It is also often the case that there is only a single hook for hanging garments in the car. Whatever the case, when transporting multiple garments in a vehicle, some of the hangers may need to be transferred to another hook in the car, or placed on the back seat, or transferred to a trunk space; all of these options are undesirable, as the garments may become wrinkled, dirtied, or both. Furthermore, because the dry cleaner typically bundles all of the clothes together in a nice neat package, it is more desirable to keep all the garments held together rather than have to separate them in order to transport them to another location. Thus, while there are several other options to transporting multiple garments, neither is ideal.
Therefore, in light of the problems presented by the prior art, there is a need in the art for a hanging device that is capable of efficiently securing hangers for transportation, and serves as a promotional item by offering functionality to users and a marketing opportunity to distributors. It is to these ends that the present invention has been developed.